Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention described herein pertain to the field of matter management. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, one or more embodiments of the invention enable collaborative management and analysis of legal matters.
Description of the Related Art
Litigators perform critical job functions by working with a massive universe of documents consisting of evidence, attorney work product, legal research, and case filings. A small fraction of this universe of documents is relevant or “critical” at any given time to a lawyer's day-to-day case needs. This small fraction of critical documents, however, is also in its own right a large universe of documents. For example, whereas in a typical case there could be a few million documents exchanged by the parties, between a few hundred and a thousand key documents will typically be used in connection with depositions, motions and trials. In addition, lawyers must manage and access a docket or “master file” of court and litigation documents, including pleadings, motion papers, discovery requests and responses, correspondence, deposition transcripts and video, and legal work product, which in total can consist of several thousand individual documents. In order to perform their day-to-day substantive tasks (e.g., research, writing, analysis, depositions, hearings, trial) lawyers need to effectively manage, organize, and have rapid on-demand access to every individual key document.
Current systems for storing and collaborating around key documents are fragmented, overloaded, slow, and ill-equipped for the specific demands and needs of lawyers engaged in high-stakes, fast-paced, document-intensive litigation. With respect to management of evidence, the massive volume of documents requires lawyers to use complex review databases that are specifically designed for the purposes of culling through large sets of documents. These databases are not designed to enable easy, streamlined, and rapid access to individual or more limited sets of key documents.
Currently there are a number of solutions for litigation management and analysis. These solutions fall into four categories: (a) Case Analysis Software, (b) e-Discovery Review Tools, (c) Document Management Systems, and (d) General Enterprise Collaboration Software.                Case Analysis Software. The current slate of case analysis software is limited, difficult to use, ineffective, and not collaborative. The primary solutions are not designed with a litigator's day-to-day workflow in mind.        E-Discovery Review Tools. E-discovery review tools serve a particular purpose in the life of the litigation: These tools are designed to house thousands or millions of documents to facilitate a large-scale review, performed manually by attorneys or automated by a method such as predictive coding. This review can be done for the purposes of determining what documents need to be produced to the other side, to review what the other side produced to determine what is important, or both. Partners, senior attorneys, and clients typically stay away from these solutions, relying on junior associates and support staff to pull documents they need. We view these tools as complementary to our invention, and essential to conduct the massive review necessary to identify the key documents housed within the present invention. The present invention effectively sits on top of these massive databases, and all the key documents identified in the database are easily fed into the present invention.        Document Management Systems (“DMS”). The primary use of DMS by law firms is for version control in document drafting. As with e-discovery review tools, we view this use as complementary to the present invention. Some firms store the master file for the case via their DMS, i.e., the litigation and court documents, like pleadings, discovery, motions, transcripts, orders and the like. Other firms use a combination of DMS and network folders to store the master file. Popular DMS have little to no collaborative elements. They are also not cloud based, meaning increased IT and hardware expenditures. They also offer a very archaic and unintuitive user interface.        General Enterprise Collaboration Software. These solutions are not viable options for the legal industry. They offer no case management or analysis features, or anything specific to litigation. Without extensive custom implementation these solutions will, at best, be extremely limited in their ability to help litigators do what they need to do.        
Typical products in the case analysis and e-discovery review space use tables to display items such as documents. Each row in the column represents a different document. Each column represents a different attribute about the item. Users can customize and add numerous columns to the table layout. This often results in a table that extends beyond the right edge of the screen. This creates a number of problems: First, it requires extensive scrolling to find needed information. Second, there is no system organizing the columns based on the type of content they contain or their relationship to other columns. This makes it difficult for the user to know where to look for needed information. Third, when the user scrolls beyond the edge of the screen, the user quickly loses the ability to identify what item is represented by a given row.
In light of the complexity and volume of documents that lawyers deal with, and the limitations of existing software solutions, teams of administrative staff such as legal secretaries, litigation clerks, paralegals, and litigation technology specialists spend a substantial portion (if not the vast majority) of their time managing and organizing documents. With respect to critical case documents, this process often occurs manually, without significant automation by software or technology. With little standardization of organizing case documents and little technical assistance from software, it is common for the process of organizing documents to be carried out directly by more expensive junior attorneys, who chose to avoid the inefficiencies of working with layers of staff. As a result, expensive, highly trained lawyers often spend more of their time performing administrative tasks and dealing with cumbersome systems and processes for managing documents, than on the substantive legal tasks that they are best equipped to perform (e.g., research, analysis, writing). Moreover, clients, co-counsel and experts do not have readily-available access to the same universe of documents and work product as the primary outside litigation counsel. Therefore, communication and collaboration between these groups is often inefficient and not optimally productive.
With the ever-increasing scope and cost of litigation caused by the explosion of e-discovery, corporate in-house counsel are demanding greater efficiency and transparency from their outside litigation counsel. As such, litigators need an efficient system for managing, collaborating around, and sharing critical case documents. Addressing this need would increase cost-efficiency, improve client communication, and lead to better case results by freeing up attorney time for substantive tasks, and by providing better insight into key evidence and the complex relationships between key documents and witnesses.